How to Schedule Meetings with Many People at Once
Meetings aren’t easy to schedule if you have many participants, widely separated. But there’s an easy way to do it, if you reverse your thinking. Get-It-Done Guy explains.
I just love meetings! No … I don’t. I hate meetings. One big reason meetings are an abomination against nature is because of the endless work it takes to schedule them.
Thankfully, the good folks at MickeySoft came up with one solution. If your company uses Microsoft Outlook, you can look at everyone’s schedules and see who’s available when. Then you choose the time where everyone will have to reschedule an existing appointment to make it to your meeting. After all, if you’re going to have to run this lame-o experiment in apathetic multitasking, everyone else should share in the sacrifice.
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This approach has you making decisions about other people’s schedules. Isn’t that doing their work for them? That’s not fair. But there’s an even worse problem with Outlook’s solution. You have to act like a co-dependent spousal equivalent when forcing your time on your colleagues, but then, just when you really need it, Outlook doesn’t cross boundaries. What kind of co-dependent software doesn’t cross boundaries?
If you have three internal people, a client, and a freelancer on your team, Outlook scheduling is useless because the external people don’t keep their calendar on your server.
Use an Incoming System
The Outlook solution is an outgoing model. You, the meeting planner, are looking out at the attendees, trying to bend them to your will. How … crude. Far better to use an incoming model. You, the innocent black widow, recline at the center of your web, as your meeting attendees come to you, groveling, for the privilege of joining your exclusive clique.
Send out a message to all prospective attendees. Say “We need to meet sometime next week on Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday, between 2pm and 4pm. Please drop me a quick email giving me the times that work for you.” You’ll get back several emails, browse through them, and look for overlap time.
An inbound approach is better: It’s friendlier! People can choose their own times, and with that feeling of autonomy, they’ll be much more psyched to come and eagerly participate in your meeting. It also works even for people who don’t use Outlook, since they can get back to you with their times.
Doodle Automates This System
The only downside is that if you’re the spider and they’re the flies, you have to do all the work of stinging them, wrapping them in silk, and slowly digesting them from the inside out. And by that I mean, coordinating all the replies you get. Fortunately, there’s a free online tool that will your dirty work for you: Doodle.com.
The inbound approach is better: it’s friendlier!
Doodle was started by Myke Näf, who needed to get a group of friends together for dinner. He used an inbound approach, and realized that coordinating a bunch of responses is exactly what computers are good at. So he created Doodle.
You can use Doodle anonymously, or you can get an account. You create an event and identify all the dates and times you’re considering to hold it. Then you mail out a link to the event to all the attendees. Or if you prefer, Doodle will do the emailing. Each person clicks the link and enters their availability. You can check back at your poll and see how many people can attend each time slot. You then choose the time when the greatest number of participants (or fewest, if you just want to get your jollies with arbitrary displays of power) can make it.
You can also register for an account to keep all of your past Doodles in one place. The basic service is free, and if you upgrade to Premium, you can also get integration with Apple iCloud calendars.
Use Doodle for RSVPs
You don’t need to give people choices, however. If you only enter a single date and time for people to choose from, Doodle effectively becomes an RSVP system. People just choose the one date if they’re coming, otherwise they don’t answer the poll.
And Doodle also offers “free-text” polls where you’re supposed to enter dates and times like “next Thursday” or “every Wednesday.” Here, you can break out of the mold, think outside the box, and use the free-text poll for potluck signups. List options like “crumpets” and “Oreo Ice Cream Cake.” Instead of signing up for time slots, people sign up for what they’re going to bring.
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. (And by “man,” I mean a male, female, transgendered, or intersex human.) And sometimes, a man’s gotta schedule a meeting with a lot of people. Using an inbound approach is friendliest: instead of giving people a “take-it-or-leave-it” choice, it lets everyone schedule in a way that works for them. Doodle.com automates inbound scheduling and can even be used as an RSVP system and potluck coordination tool. It may even function as a dessert topping.
For more of Get-It-Done Guy’s tips to work less and do more, visit get it done guy. Post questions and connect with Stever on on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
